Conference Proceedings

“Site Reading: How Urban History Learned to See”

by Robert Fishman

ABSTRACT: Stephan Thernstrom’s Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (1964), the first major work of “the new urban history” had 16 tables, no maps, and no illustrations. Nineteenth-century Cities, the 1969 collection of articles edited by Thernstrom and Richard Sennett that defined the major themes of the new urban history, had 77 tables, one map, and no illustrations. This presentation aimed to show how the new urban history's seeming blindness to visual reality led directly to a new and deeper response to the built environment by urban historians. Precisely by leading urban history in Thernstrom's and Sennett's words to “broaden the scope -- to embrace the social experience of ordinary, unexceptional people,” the new urban history prompted new attention to the broader, “unexceptional” physical environment in which these “ordinary” people lived. As a result, urban history opened up an important visually-oriented dialogue with architectural historians who were simultaneously seeking to broaden their approach to the built environment.

Session I, Keynotes: The History of the History of the Built Environment

Text of paper not available.